Marcia Brady

Where was I? Oh yeah, Marcia Brady.

Well, Marcia wants to jump my bones, plain and simple.

I met him at Toronado for a beer. To be honest, we don't have that much to talk about. He's a nice guy, plays a lot of volleyball, works as an independent contractor. So to keep the conversation moving, Marcia repeatedly reminded me that we slept together 5 or 6 years ago. That may be true, but I have absolutely no recollection of ever meeting him. Which, if you think about it, doesn't bode very well for our hooking up again, now does it?

Cindy Brady

Another day, another hellish Match.com dream date.

Let's start with last night's date, whom I shall call "Cindy." Cindy, as you might expect, is a few years younger than I. Neither he nor I was sure whether we had a lot in common, but anyone with a nice profile pic who knows all the words to Rapper's Delight (and sings them in the shower) can't be all bad, right? We had a long chat on Monday night and agreed to meet up last night at Citrus Club. I have swim practice on Wednesdays, so we agreed to meet up afterwards, around 8:15 p.m.

Everything seemed fine until we met. I called him after I got out of the pool, and he seemed to be in a relaxed mood. The instant we met, the tone changed. He became withdrawn, distracted and argumentative. Citrus Club was too crowded, so we went across the street to a Lebanese place. The maitre d' sat us in a high-traffic area. He complained throughout the meal of being buffeted by people walking by, yet did nothing to solve the problem. He poured too much hot sauce on his couscous, and complained about that as well. He stared intently at the map behind me.

Then he proceeded to attack me. "You say on your profile that you have never been in a committed relationship," he said. "How can you be 36 years old and have never been in a committed relationship?"

The date was a bust before this and was only going downhill. I doubt that he would have accepted any response that I gave, but at least I should have answered the question on my own terms. Instead, I decided to answer the question on his.

"Quite frankly, I've never met the right guy. For me, relationships are not a goal in themselves, but instead are a consequence of meeting the right guy. It's rare that I meet someone who really sparks my interest, and for a vareity of reasons nothing has ever panned out with those guys."

"I suppose part of the reason why I don't meet a lot of guys I connect with is that, for as large a city as San Francisco is, I'm rarely in a position to meet guys. All of my co-workers are straight; all of my triathlon buddies are straight. I've got a good group of gay friends, but I've tapped out all of their connections."

"Part of it too, I think, has to do with the fact that I hate the process of dating. Dating is often so reductivist, like we're recruiters sizing up a candidate. I'd like to think that dating is more of an opportunity to meet a lot of really interesting people and seeing where it leads."

We argued for a few minutes about whether I was entitled to dislike dating. "How can you say you dislike dating when you've never experienced what it's like on the other side," he said.

The argument was quickly growing absurd. I don't care whether anybody has been in a relationship. Just because you've been in a relationship doesn't mean that you have the emotional toolkit to be in a successful relationship. Plenty of people go from failed relationship to failed relationship, but plenty of other people have made their first relationship work.

After a few more pointed comments about how slowly I was eating, we paid up and said our goodbyes.

Next time I'll write about my date with "Marcia."

Hummers In the Park

The New York Times published an article this morning about public sex this morning, and Andy Towle is apoplectic. I'm merely nonplussed.

While I share Andy's basic concern, i.e., Why was this article published?, I fail to share his outrage. It's not as if an article about gay men having sex in public is exactly news, since there's nothing new about it. Gay men have been poking (heh heh) around in the bushes ever since there were men and bushes.

There are two things I found most interesting about the piece. One was the matter-of-fact listing of cruising spots on Long Island and the outer boroughs, e.g., "Two Mile Hollow Beach in East Hampton, the Field 6 parking lot at Jones Beach, a rest stop near Exit 52 on the Long Island Expressway and the park-and-ride lot on Route 110 in Melville," news that was once usually confined to the pages of a Damron guide.

The other was the mechanics of the cruising at the spot the author visited (Cunningham Park in Queens). It seems that since there are no readily accessible bathrooms or shrubbery, men do the deed entirely within their cars, with perhaps an occasional trip to a motel for a longer-term hookup.

The Times has been writing articles about the lives of gay men with apparent increasing frequency. One of Andy's commentators noted that the Times recently posted an article about gay black churches in Brooklyn. However, it seems that there is no effort to tie these explorations of gay life together, or even to acknowledge that these pieces are explorations.

Surely we have arrived at a place where we can examine what it means to live life day to day as a gay man without worrying whether the examination shines an unfavorable light. Today's article briefly touches on the fact that many of the men who have sex at Cunningham Park are married. Are these men secretly gay or bisexual? If so, why didn't the Times write an article about them? Why didn't the Times write about the tensions of being a man who is married and has children yet who is also sexually drawn to men?

Perhaps some of these men aren't really gay at all. How does a man who has no appreciable sexual attraction to men find himself in Cunningham Park getting a hummer in the back of his Grand Cherokee? And how did he find out where to go?

Perhaps the most revealing insight of the whole article is that the cruising takes place within plain sight of the entire park community, yet is invisible to them. Softball players and soccer moms use the lot as well. When asked about the cruising, Mark Haken, the president of the Friends of Cunningham Park said that he was "totally unaware" of the sexual activity, although he added "I don't think that 10-year-olds in a parking lot on the way to soccer should see some guy getting oral sex in a car."

That's where Andy blew up.

From sentence one the writer chooses to associate the gay men cruising with the children playing baseball. Just sick. While the suggestion that cruising in rest areas and parking lots is a behavior common among all gay men is disgusting enough, this further association with pedophilia is not something I thought I'd see ever happen in the Times.

I think Andy's (and Mark Haken's) concern is misplaced. Doesn't the fact that the cruising has happened under the noses of the softball players and soccer moms for so long establish that innocent 10-year-olds will not interrupt a vehicular rendezvous? The cruising spot exists because it is invisible, yet it is invisible in an extremely visible spot.

We see what we want to see, even in one of the most populous and crowded cities in the world.

Jockstraps

Last night I was down in the garage working on my bike. Since I was going to be downstairs anyway, I decided to do some laundry. As these things happen, I got caught up in doing a bunch of things and forgot my laundry until just before bedtime. When I went downstairs to retrieve my laundry, I found it sitting on top of the dryer. I put my laundry in the basket and went upstairs.

As I was folding my laundry, I discovered that a jockstrap had made its way into my basket. At first I didn't know what it was. It was this tiny black web of elastic and mesh. Once I got it untangled and looked at it properly, I realized what a ridiculous thing it was. How on earth was this tiny little patch of mesh supposed to keep my boss safe and sound? And even if by some miracle it could, why would I want to bother with untangling the elastic straps? They were thin and short and certain to chafe.

What's more, by all appearances this was a traditional jock. Although ridiculously tiny, it didn't look like it came out of the International Male catalog. The brand name was "Safetgard," which sure sounds like a regular guy jock brand name to me. But maybe the jockstrap has become so marginalized that all jockstraps are novelty wear nowadays.

Call me crazy, but I didn't see anything in the jockstrap that a decent pair of briefs couldn't do better. Except maybe invoke desire. But you'd have to ask Scott about that.

Dude, Where's My Summer? (Part Quatre)

Not to harp on this, but it's winter outside.

Dude, Where's My Summer? (Part Trois)

I saw my breath on the way to work this morning. Now, I like cold weather (maybe more than most people), but this shiznit has got to stop.

More Things Strapped to the Front of Work Trucks

Mission and Beale Streets
San Francisco, CA

Dude, Where's My Summer? (Part Deux)

It's a Beautiful Morning

The sun is out, the little birdies are chirping, and I'm off to Marin to thrash myself on the Pine Mountain Death March.

Maybe this year I won't run out of water and suffer heatstroke and cramps in both legs.

See ya.

If ever you needed confirmation that being gay was like being in high school for the rest of your life, this is it. Joe.My.God and an unknown number of other like-minded bloggers have decided to punish Rocco for his offensive and often homophobic blog. However, since this is BlogLand, where one's identity is merely an aggregation of speeding electrons, there's not much they can do to him. They could write pissy comments on Rocco's blog, but Rocco could just delete them. Thus, these bloggers decided to take a high-minded approach and de-link Rocco's blog. Fair enough. The only problem was that none of these bloggers linked to Rocco, since linking obviously demonstrates a tacit approval of the blogger and/or his blog. So they decided to take the next best step and de-link anybody who links to Rocco. As Joe put it, he de-linked blogs that link to Rocco's blog on the theory that he "really hated the idea of someone getting to this guy's lousy blog via mine, however convoluted the connection." Even if the de-linked person was a good friend.

Oh, and Joe neglected to tell his friends that he did this.

Now, Joe is a smart man, so he must realize how foolish this idea is. First off, Joe apparently only de-linked first-degree links. So if Joe linked to a blog that links to another blog that links to Rocco's blog, the first blog is not de-linked. And since we're not just talking about the entire Internet, and not even about blogs in general but about a tiny subset of blogs (that is, blogs by gay men), well... Let's just say that it's REALLY easy to get from Blog A to Blog B.

And Joe's attempts to avoid the consequences of his behavior by not talking about it (until, that is, he posted it on his blog)? I don't need to go there.

You're on a fool's errand, Joe. Give it up.

But even if Joe and his gang were somehow able to purify their blog links, what of it? I don't know whether I'd like Rocco as a person, but I do know that I don't read Rocco's blog anymore -- not because I found it offensive (which I often did), but because (1) it's boring and (2) it's not meant for me. I don't care which of his rugby teammates he hates this week. I've never met any of them and almost certainly never will. If he wants to call one of them a Vadge of the Week, what standing do I have to complain?

I certainly have no expectation that Rocco would like my blog or even read it. There are only about three people in the world who care what I think about hotel soap, and he's not one of them.

So take a chill pill, Joe. You're not going to make the world a better place by de-linking your friends. Besides, Oliver's your study buddy, and if you drop him now, you're totally going to bomb on that trig exam next Friday.

Yet another tardy post. But I've been busy.

On Saturday I drove up to Tahoe to pre-ride the national championship race course. The weekend before that I was in Geyserville for the Lake Sonoma Xterra. The weekend before that I was in Sisters, Oregon for the Sisters High Cascades Xterra. You really should make the drive up there sometime. Mt. Shasta is lovely this time of year.

The good news is that all was not for...ummm...naught. While I missed earning national championship points in Sisters by 27 freakin' seconds, I took 15th place at Lake Sonoma against much stronger age group competition. I now have a hammerlock on 18th place in the South West region. Not that 18th place will get me to the national championship or anything, but it's still nice to say I'm there.

Lake Sonoma Xterra
02:40:19 OA 75/117 AG 15/26

Sisters High Cascades Xterra
03:00:18 OA 93/130 AG 16/19